Nasa's Orion mission will go further than ever before, but how will it get us to Mars and beyond?

The Orion crew module for Exploration Mission-1 in 2018 arrived to Kennedy Space Center in February of 2016

Lockheed Martin / Dusty Volkel

The Orion space mission is one of Nasa's most ambitious ever. The spacecraft is planned to take humans into deep space before bringing them home again and it could finally help us explore the far reaches of our solar system.

Planning, design and construction of the spacecraft has been happening for more than a decade, with the first successful test of its crew-carrying vehicle in December 2014.

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During the Orion craft's 97-minute coast – Exploration Flight Test 1 – the unmanned rocket was put into a slow roll to control its temperature. The launch of the craft was dubbed the "first step" on the mission to Mars.

As Nasa's mission progresses there are several stages to developing the craft that will carry humans (potentially) deeper into space than ever before.

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What is the mission?

Like any human-carrying spacecraft, the Orion vehicle has several phases of development – even before humans will put a foot on the launchpad. The EFT-1 flight in 2014 was the first stage of this but it will be followed by the next take-off as soon as 2018.

Exploration Mission 1 (EM1) is planned to send the spacecraft "beyond the Moon and back". It will be launched into low-Earth orbit before the upper stage is fired around the Moon. "The spacecraft will perform a flyby of the Moon, using lunar gravity to gain speed and propel itself 70 000 km beyond the Moon, almost half a million km from Earth – further than any human has ever travelled," the European Space Agency, which is providing a service module (the primary power source) says.

The EM1 flight is expected to last for 20 days before it splashes down in the ocean. There's no firm launch date for the craft but Nasa has hinted it could be as early as September 2018.

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The second flight of the Orion exploratory phase (EM2) steps things up a notch. The vehicle will conduct the same flight as the first craft but carry four humans. The mission, again, has no specific launch date and will depend on how the EM1 happens but it's been indicated the flight will be no later than 2023. "We're committed to 2021, and we're on track for that," Scott Wilson, a Nasa manager of production for the Orion program, said in September 2016.

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After a second successful test flight, the Orion mission will focus on taking humans further into space. "In the 2020s, Orion will carry astronauts to an asteroid," Nasa says. "In the 2030s, Nasa's goal is for Orion to carry the first human explorers to Mars".

Where is it now?

"Within six months we will be powered on," Rob Chambers, Lockheed Martin's Orion production strategy lead told WIRED – the company is building the Orion craft for Nasa.

"That initial power-on of EM1 is a really big event because that's when all the computers, software, and hardware get turned on and integrated together for the first time."

Chambers explains the firm is concurrently building both of the EM1 and EM2. The second craft is around 80 to 85 per cent of the same design as its predecessor. "Just about everything we do on EM1, the uncrewed vehicle, translate forward," Chambers says. "Most of the changes come in the software and displays world."

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To get to Mars there is a lot of development to be done. The cost for EM3 (the first manned mission that isn't around the Moon), Chambers says, needs to be decreased. This reduction could come with new materials, different primary structures, and he says a lot of investment from Lockheed Martin is being put into developing new technologies.

On December 12, the propulsion system that will provide thrust to the Orion craft when it is in space completed its major assembly phase. Nasa says: "The Boeing-designed interim cryogenic propulsion stage (ICPS) is a liquid oxygen/liquid hydrogen-based system that will give Orion an extra punch of power on the first, uncrewed flight of the spacecraft with Nasa's new rocket, the Space Launch System in late 2018"